Tag Archives: best quotes about reading

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

From George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in the sprawling epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the source of HBO’s highly acclaimed series, Game of Thrones. The quotation appears in chapter 34, when Jojen Reed is talking to Bran Strark. Jojen, a member of the House Reed, possesses greensight, the power of prophetic green dreams. Although Jojen has greensight, he is not a greenseer, as he explains to Bran: “No, [I am not a greenseer] only a boy who dreams. The greenseers were more than that. They were wargs [a skinchanger, a person with the ability to enter the mind of an animal and control its actions] as well, as you are, and the greatest of them could wear the skins of any beast that flies or swims or crawls, and could look through the eyes of the weirwoods [deciduous trees of Westerns that have blood red leaves and bone white trunks] as well, and see the truth that lies beneath the world.”

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“Still, anyone with a taste for wonder — not all, apparently, have it — should learn to haunt used bookstores, even more than stores that sell new books… Each person should take pains to scout his own city on this score… The used bookstore, unlike the catalogue or even the library, puts us in a place where we can come across and buy some unsuspected title that turns out to get at the essence of what is.“

From Another Sort of Learning: Selected Contrary Essays on How Finally to Acquire an Education by James Schall, S.J.

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Meet Hope Faith Wiggins — a sweet and precocious 8-year-old girl from Aldine, Texas who is a real inspiration for book lovers around the world. Her family could not afford a summer vacation, so Hope used her imagination and took a different kind a vacation — a voyage through the world of books. Specifically, she pledged to read 300 books before school began on August 19. Her proud mother reflected on the 300-book vacation: “The library opened up so many worlds. It was like a vacation, but inside our house.” Hope made dozens of trips to the library, collecting books by the armful, to exceed her goal. By mid-August, she had read 302 books. Hope’s profound love of books is infectious; she explains: “I like reading a lot because it’s fun. It’s like being inside of a whole other world. You can imagine that you’re the character, and for me, one thing that happens when I read a book or watch a video is I dream about it.”

One of her favorite books is Our Enduring Spirit: President Barack Obama’s First Words to America. Hope recently experienced something very tragic: she lost a close childhood friend to cancer. Each day she wears a yellow bow in her hair to keep the memory of her friend alive. It is that profound loss that inspired her dream career: to be a pediatric oncologist. She is certainly well on her way — the best education, as many philosophers and writers know so well, is self-education motivated by the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Moreover, at such a young age, Hope understands the importance of having a good heart as well as a good head; in the words of another inspirational and remarkable human being, Nelson Mendala: “A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.” Indeed, the world is a better place because of Hope.

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Marcel Proust (born Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, 1871; died in 1922) was a French novelist considered by many literary critics as one of the greatest authors of all time. Proust is best known for his brilliant and imaginative magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Thing Past) published between 1913 to 1927. But don’t expect to find In Search of Lost Time on many campus syllabi — the novel spanning 7 volumes 3,031 pages, containing more than 1,267,069 words, and more than 2,000 characters — is a daunting read; not surprisingly, it is one of the longest novels of all time. At best, during a semester, a college course can focus on a particular book or excerpts from the seven books.

The semi-autobiographical novel explores the narrator’s life (M, a young man who wants to be a writer) through very nuanced (and often melancholic) memories and reflections, that are often triggered by a sensory experiences (eg., eating a madeleine). In short, the novel is like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle that gradually comes together, piece by piece. If you could summarize the book in one sentence, this quote from the book comes close: “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Here are some of the most beautifully-written, insightful reflections from Proust’s literary works.

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.”

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.”

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

At times the reading of a novel that was at all sad carried me suddenly back, for certain novels are like great but temporary bereavements, abolishing habit, bringing us once more into contact with the reality of life, but for a few hours only, like a nightmare, since the force of habit, the oblivion it creates, the gaiety it restores to us because of the powerlessness of the brain to fight against it and to re-create the truth, infinitely outweigh the almost hypnotic suggestion of a good book which, like all such influences, has very transient effects.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”

“Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”

“There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.”

“It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.”

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”

“Love is not vain because it is frustrated, but because it is fulfilled. The people we love turn to ashes when we posess them.”

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”

“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.”

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”

“The thirst for something other than what we have… to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.”

“The greatest symbol of what writing is about is the full text version of the Oxford English Dictionary… the physical enormity of the printed text gives a writer a sense of humility (if that is still possible), because the mountain to be scaled is the language. Auden used to sit on the first volume while at the dinner table, the better to stay even with language and with dinner. Any good teacher I’ve ever had—and the best was John McPhee—stressed the enormity of choice English provides, its capacity for clarity and ambiguity, dullness and thrill. It is the greatest invention ever devised (and re-devised). And, of course, the only way to get anywhere as a writer is to have read ceaselessly and then read some more. [Ezra] Pound says somewhere that it is incredible to him that so many [so-called] poets simply pick up a pen and start writing verse and call it poetry, while a would-be pianist knows full well how necessary it is to master scales and thousands of exercises before making music worthy of the name. Playing scales, for a writer, means reading. Is there any real writing that has no reading behind it? I don’t think so.”

David Remnick, journalist, writer and editor of The New Yorker magazine.

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“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, American author and poet, best known for her fantasy and science fiction novels, most notably the Earthsea fantasy series. In 2001, Le Guin was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. A short time later, in 2014, she was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a lifetime achievement award, by the National Book Foundation.